


What It's All For

by I_Am_The_Circle



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Episode Response- Oh How We Danced, F/M, Missing home, No Dialogue, Run-On Sentences, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-14 23:30:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8033245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Am_The_Circle/pseuds/I_Am_The_Circle
Summary: A look into BJ's thoughts on any given day at the 4077th.





	What It's All For

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by season nine, episode fourteen "Oh, How We Danced". I was sad, so I wrote a sad BJ.
> 
> I know at some points Erin is old enough to write & walk, but in this particular episode she is apparently a baby, so that's what I went with. (What are timelines, anyway?) 
> 
> Enjoy!

Sometimes he wakes up and thinks he hears her voice, humming as she gets ready for the day. In that moment between dreams and wakefulness, BJ is back in a little white house in Mill Valley with his wife and daughter. He isn't bone tired because of twenty hours of surgery the day before, he's exhausted from getting up last night to calm a crying Erin down every hour or so. Oh god, how BJ wishes he was tired for such a wonderful reason. He knows everyone complains about how difficult it is to raise a baby, up at all hours of the night trying to comfort a tiny person who can't express what it is they need, but all he can think is there's nothing he'd rather be doing than falling asleep at the breakfast table after a long, stressful night being a father to his ever-growing child. 

As sleep fades away, BJ lays in his bunk with his eyes closed and realizes, all at once, where he is. He hears Hawkeye, sometimes snoring, sometimes warbling show tunes while shaving. He feels the intense heat, or else the intense cold that the 38th parallel provides, and he knows the weather is never like that in Mill Valley. In Mill Valley, it never gets too cold, and the wind and fog off the bay keeps it from becoming an oven like Southern California. BJ knows he'll have to open his eyes eventually, but for now he's just trying to keep Mill Valley alive for a moment longer. He's trying to remember the colors of Peg's eyes and envision how big Erin is at that moment, how her chubby fingers must be getting longer and her hair might be several shades lighter than when he left, ever closer to her mother's platinum blonde. 

And eventually he gets up, gets ready, cracks jokes about what could've crawled into Igor's pot for today's breakfast, and tries to forget that he should be called "Daddy" instead of Captain Hunnicutt. He and Hawk make fun of Charles, blacken the reputation of this man's army, and talk a little sedition, and for a little while, BJ can escape with puns and practical jokes. But sometimes it's hard to be around your best friend when you remember that the only reason you became best friends is because of this war, the constant death and the loneliness that pervades every waking moment. And even though Hawkeye is the best friend he's ever had and he wouldn't trade him for the world, he can't help but wish some days that they'd never met at all. That he was still in Mill Valley with his family and a shiny new job at the hospital, and that Hawkeye was in Crabapple Cove adding another "Pierce" to the sign out front of his father's private practice.

Inevitably, whether they're done with what serves as breakfast or not, a voice comes over the PA announcing that the war hasn't stopped for morning coffee, and that while they've bickered and bantered in the mess tent, boys barely out of school were being shot at and dying. So it's off to the races again, how fast can they wash up and get into OR, how many kids they can sew back together, how many jokes do they have to make to make it bearable? But jokes or not, the wounded keep coming- American, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Greek, occasionally Canadian and British. A sea of faces and endless blood washes through the operating room until BJ can hardly keep them straight. How many hours have they been operating? How many kids have nearly bled out on his operating table? He's never sure, but his hands keep moving, keep cutting, keep sewing, ever steady.

Even though his mouth gives near-constant commentary, playing off Hawkeye's jokes with casual puns, BJ is wondering- wondering what it's all for, what the damn difference is between any of these kids on the table, Yankees, North Koreans, South Koreans. When you blow them up and stitch them back together from the inside, they all look the same. He may not always be as vocal or dramatic as Hawkeye, but BJ hates the army and the war just as much. Sometimes a man near his age passes through OR and all he can think is whether this guy has a Peg and an Erin back home, waiting for him to come back and live a real life. 

Sometimes a nearby village gets shelled and suddenly he's operating on kids that could be Erin in just a few years and BJ just can't understand why. Why he's here in this country across the world from home, why these people are living in huts in constant fear of mortar fire from any of the armies fighting all around them, why all of these lives, different as they are, have been caught in the crossfire of this war they won't even call a war. Well, BJ Hunnicutt has spent thirty-six hour days trying to put kids irreparably wounded back together without an instruction manual, and if this isn't war, he thinks, what is? The effects are the same- shell shocked boys on the front line, exhausted doctors and nurses, an ever growing body count, and generals who get the credit without getting the shells and the mortar fire. 

And at the end of the day, after washing off the blood and washing down the misery with miserable gin, BJ climbs into his bunk, rereads his last letter from Peg, and thinks about how far Korea is from Mill Valley. He thinks about how people change. He's certainly not the same fresh-faced kid who showed up here not a year and a half ago, Peg's spent a year taking care of Erin and the house all alone and what if she doesn't need him anymore? And of course Erin, who could hardly speak full sentences last he saw her, is always growing. She's learning and experiencing and becoming her own person, a person BJ's never even met. A person who calls other men in uniform "Daddy". And when he thinks about why, he still doesn't know. BJ knows a lot of things- all of the bones in the human body, the procedure for arterial transplants, how to fashion a makeshift dialysis machine out of spare parts, and a million other things he wishes he didn't have to know- but he'll never know what it's all for.


End file.
